Mono.Kultur # 28Bless

Bless begins with a beautiful story: In 1996, the entirely-unknown fashion label of sorts announced its existence to the world via an advertisement in the British style bible i-D, offering a — fur wig. Maybe naively expecting the world to take notice, the phone ended up ringing just once, but as it happens, it turned out to be a call from Paris. A few months later, all models for Maison Martin Margiela’s Autumn/Winter 1997 collection ended up wearing fur wigs on the catwalk. The fashion world took notice, and Bless got the attention it had hoped for, after all.

But maybe more important than the surrounding story is the ambiguity of the fur wigs as such — a reimagining of a wig as a hat, or vice versa — that would become a sort of signature of Bless to this very day. Since then, Bless has been firmly in between: in between fashion and product design, in between fine art and commerce, in between Paris and Berlin, in between the practical and the outright bizarre.